Blowback - S1 Episode 7 - "#Resistance"

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

Somehow not expecting it, the Americans now face an insurgency problem, as both Sunni and Shi'a militants emerge to kick us out. War crimes and atrocities in Fallujah, Sadr City and Abu Ghraib fuel the flames of anti-American resistance.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The little serpent has left and the great serpent has come. The big serpent was Saddam Hussein and the Americans are the small serpent? It is the opposite, my friend. The Americans are the big serpent. The Americans got rid of your enemy. Saddam Hussein isn't the enemy your enemy, your friend? Just because we're rid of Saddam and the evil bathists doesn't mean the occupation is a good thing. Our salvation from Saddam was only with the grace of God. All praises to Allah.

He works in mysterious ways. He works. Welcome to Blowback, a podcast about the Iraq War. I'm Noah Colvin. I'm Brendan James. And this is Episode 7, hashtag Resistance. This episode today is mostly going to be about the end of 2003 into 2004. Last episode, episode six, we talked about the first year of the American occupation through the lens of the coalition provisional authority, the CPA, and policies like debautification. And today, we're going to talk about what all of that. provoked and what evil and ugly shit we resorted to. The first part of today's episode is going to be about a really important opponent of the American occupation, the Shia leader, Mukta al-Sadr. And the

second part is going to be about the rise of the Sunni insurgency and some of the myths that the Americans created to deal with it. In the last part of today's episode, we'll be about Abu Ghraib and the revelations about the horrible things we did there. In April, the people of Majas swiftly replaced the picture of Saddam Hussein with a man he killed, their hero Ayatollah Sadar. When the British arrived, they were pleased, but what they told us today suggests the grievances of overcome their gratitude, and local men killed and injured the British troops. Something that we've talked about at a few different points on the show is that

that under Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athist party's rule, the Iraqi government was run by Sunni Muslims. The thing is, Sunni Muslims only account for one-third of Iraq's Muslim population. The remaining two-thirds are Shia. This is pretty exceptional among Muslim nations as something like 85 to 90% of the world's Muslims are Sunni. So that there are a lot of Shia Muslims in Iraq makes a lot of sense, because Ali, whom Shia Muslims believe to be Muhammad's rightful successor, he's buried in Iraq in the city of Kuwait. which is very close to the city of Najaf, which is like the spiritual stronghold of Shia Muslims. Under Saddam, Shia Muslims were kept under a very tight leash, as the Baathis party and Saddam were part of the country's Sunni minority. Shia Muslims were not allowed to make religious

pilgrimages, even within Iraq, to their holy sites. And most public religious stuff in general was out of the question. Influential Shia religious clerics were, they weren't, you know, killed off by Saddam. They were kept under very strict control as part of the the delicate balancing act that Saddam maintained in order to keep control of the country. So when American soldiers rolled into Iraq in 2003, they didn't really quite know what to expect in part because they weren't prepared because, as we've discussed at length on the show, we didn't know shit about shit when we invaded the country. Correct.

But there was something new that they saw that they didn't really expect unseen. So with Saddam Hussein gone, Shiite Muslims in Iraq were able to be publicly Shia. And naturally, the Americans understood that if they were going to form. a government, a specific subject that we're going to get to later on, the Shia Muslims were probably going to comprise the majority of that government, even if they were sharing power with the Sunnis. So in those early days after the invasion, when Jay Garner and Paul Bremer and the CPA were just sort of getting their bearings, it was actually the Shia religious networks that had been mostly underground during Saddam's time that really came out. And they weren't

initially hostile to the Americans so much as they saw very quickly how everything was crumbling. For example, the looting that we discussed that was happening on the ground, like immediately after the invasion. It was actually Shia clerics who organized a lot of the sort of de facto police squads and property recovery units, which were totally insubstantial, but the only gesture at actually, you know, keeping civil society together was coming from those elements. Yeah, while Rumsfeld and the DOD was saying, even bother intervening, let them do it. Exactly.

On April 10th, 2003, so about three weeks after the invasion, an Ayatollah from a family of influential Shia clerics was shot, stabbed, and hacked to death by a mob in Najaf. This Ayatollah was from the Al-Khoi family. He was, as Patrick Coburn described him in 2003, a popular liberal sort of Ayatola, somebody whom the Americans were actually pretty enthusiastic about working with, as evidenced by the fact that they let him into a rock when they had not yet let in some of the...

Our own guys. Yeah, some of our own guys. And so he had hit the ground and he was already working the streets trying to, you know, bring factions together and see what they could build in this new post-Saddam reality.

And according to journalist George Packer, who was a correspondent for the New Yorker, when Jay Garner's team got wind of how Al-Hoy was killed, he didn't actually, his team didn't give it a lot of attention. A general told Packer,

Oh, it's just them killing each other. This was, to put it mildly, the wrong read. The mob that killed El Joi was a group of men loyal to a cleric from another influential religious family, a guy who wasn't even yet 30 years old and who, frankly, wasn't even on the Americans' radar. That guy's name was Mukta al-Sutter. He's been in hiding for the past few weeks, evading U.S. forces who'd vowed to take him dead or alive.

The Americans were puzzled by Al-Sauder. They didn't know much about him. The media and government officials described him as this. mysterious shadowy cleric, and they knew that Saddam had killed his father and two brothers in 1999 after that pre-ashear revolt. Yeah, he came, he was almost like religious royalty in Iraq. He came from a family that was very well established and very well known, but he himself was really just, I mean, he was sort of just a scrappy young upstart at the time. But the thing that was important was that he was the most important person who from the moment that the American boots

hit the ground and even before then was willing to tell the Americans to fuck off. Right. Al-Sadder's legitimacy, yeah, came from his father, who was a religious leader in command of what is called the soderist movement. Sodorism, while it has sort of deep theological convictions, it's not the same theological impulses that drive the Iranian government. Sodorism is more concerned with developing a society that has, you know, healthy Islamic norms. So they're, you know, pretty into women wearing the veil, things of that nature. But they're also much more concerned with, you know, what I think we would call in the United States. our issues of social justice. Their base was primarily poor people. The Shia population in Iraq were the underclass and even a movement that boiled up in religious terms would have to

handle and be able to politicize their class. Right. And I think that the other part of this is that you know, when you talk about like as you say this kind of material situation, the reality was that there is the biggest like population center of Shia Muslims in Iraq was not in Najaf. If it was not in these religious shrines or cities of those religious shrines, it was in Baghdad, in a slum of Baghdad previously called Saddam City, but which was soon rechristened after the American invasion, Sadr City. I also like how there's a slum that's malnourished and everyone inside of it desires to either move out of it or see their lot improved. And Saddam looks and that and goes, yeah, I'm going to call that Saddam City. And here you had two to two and a half million people living in about 20 square kilometers. it's the worst possible conditions you can imagine. And also, these are people who are uniquely

positioned to bear the brunt of the American occupation, which is being run out of Baghdad. But yeah, I think we have to stress, you know, just how the Madi Army earned its popular support. You know, in a country that had been reduced to rubble by the Americans, Maktada al-Sauder's outfits stepped up. I'm quoting from Anthony Shadid's book here. Quote, the Madi Army returned stolen cars, set up checkpoints to prevent looting, helped deliver kerosene and flour, and even paid the salaries of workers for a while. Surrounded by young advisors, Mukta said, quote, what I can do, I do. And that's what it's all about. That's what the FBI could never understand.

That what the organization does is offer protection for people who can't go to the cops. One of the ways that the American media tended to kind of obfuscate the nature of this and what solderism was from the outset was that, you know, they would do things like call solder City, a suburb of Baghdad, which in a technical sense might be true. But the reality was that Sadrism wasn't some weird, strange theological force that the Americans didn't quite understand and was, you know, befuddling to them. It was actually that solderism was just the religious movement that did two things most successfully, which was one, advocate aggressively to get the Americans out, and articulate a vision of society that at least resembled something more equal than the way

it was currently run. Give me a little bit of a portrait of El Sauter here, because he's going to be so important, not only in this episode, but really for the rest of our conception of Iraqi politics. What does he look like? What's his deal? What's his vibe? Al Sada dresses in black. He dresses very simply.

Cool. He speaks in kind of very straightforward declarative sentences. Right. He's always presented himself as a modest kind of guy. And unlike a lot of other tribal leaders in Iraq, what you see is what you get. Right. In fact, the great irony of him is that for all of the confusion that Americans claim to have about Mukta al-Sadr and why they didn't anticipate him or understand him, well, he's actually a pretty straightforward guy. He was always telling us exactly what he was about. He was, there was never any sort of, I don't think, any sort of grand illusion that he was selling us on.

Well, I wonder if part of that is simply the refuse, the stubborn refusal of a dying empire to go. Well, the guy who's recruiting loads of supporters and becoming increasingly popular because he wants the Americans out and calls us the giant snake. He can't possibly, that can't really be why he's popular. That can't really be why. And so here's the thing is that it's because the Americans had this insane idea about what they were coming into in Iraq, like politically. And we've discussed about how the Chalaby intelligence gave them a skewed idea, how like Bremer and the CPAs just like constant bungling like didn't give, like, you know,

that, like prohibited them from coming to an honest conclusion about what the reality was. And part of it was also that, you know, when we talked about. talk about the effect of sanctions. There had been this idea that there was going to be this secular middle class in Iraq that America was going to come in and save and that this secular middle class was going to be like Falcour from the never-ending story and that we were going to write it to, I really don't remember how that movie ends, but you get the idea. Well, it was never ending. It was the whole point. But so like we thought that the Iraqi middle class was going to be this sort of emancipating kind of force that the Americans would use to guide Iraq.

into its next phase. As we actively administered its destruction during the 1990s, we also thought by the time we invade, none of that would have, I don't know, counted or really happened. And we'd get there and they would take control of all the engines of civil society and government. Right. And Patrick Coburn had a terrific line about this, which is that the new post-Sardom Iraq had no secular heroes. So as the U.S. was not recognizing what was happening before their eyes, they were assembling the feckless and corrupt Iraqi governing council. And this was in the mid part of 2003 shortly after the invasion. Yeah, we talked about it last episode.

It was just sort of a collection of feuding politicians from Iraq. They were really just a stalking horse for Paul Bremer. And part of one of the things that, you know, a great example of how the council and how Bremer totally were misreading the political landscape was that they didn't offer an invitation to Al-Sauder. Now, Al-Sauder ended up benefiting from this domestically because as the occupation went on, his exclusion from this council was only a greater sign of his legitimacy. Right. He wasn't tainted by association with the occupation and the Americans. So initially, the Americans viewed Al-Sauder as kind of a popular thug. In fact, they looked at him as kind of like the wayward son of someone who they would have liked to have done business with.

Kind of like Saddam when you think about it. Sure. And they hadn't really counted on him coming around. So there's a quote that I want to read here that Ambassador Hume Horan, Bremer's liaison to the Shia, said of Sotter, quote, His father would be so distressed if he'd seen his son. How can you do an Eric Erickson on Maktada al-Sauder? Here's this unchurched son of one of the great churchmen who fills the role

without any of the qualifications. What is he lashing out at? Is it his own sense of inadequacy that is being projected out? So the Americans thought he was a head case, and they thought that he was working against America. because he had some daddy issues he was working through. Sure. When in reality, of course, as we just described...

Look at the fucking president who's carrying out the Iraq war. Meanwhile... So, al-Sahder during this time, he goes to ground kind of a little bit. He goes to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, and on the way back, he stops by in Iran. And now this is where Americans would begin to start developing evidence that they say showed that Al-Sadr was an Iranian puppet. This wasn't quite the case. As many of us, as many people learned when Qasem Soleimani was blown up by Donald Trump.

Iran, over the last couple decades, has worked deciduously to build a kind of network of different organizations and pseudo governments and provisional governments that can, you know, work against American and Sunni Arab interests elsewhere in the Muslim world. Hezbollah is probably the most famous example of this and the most successful example of this. Well, al-Sadr made a similar kind of pitch for himself in Iran, and the Iranians bought it, and they went along with it. And they gave him the funding to create his own sort of, or to really grow his own militia and do what would become the Madi army. Now, Maktata al-Sahder was not the only beneficiary of the Iranian government and military's

money and expertise. Other political parties, most importantly, the Supreme Council of the Islamic revolution of Iraq or Skiri, which we'll discuss further in later episodes. Skiri and other political parties and their affiliated sectarian Shia militias also benefited from the Iranian government's largesse. Now, Al-Sauder was still tight with Iran, and he remains tight with Iran. In fact, he's based there today. But just because Maktadal-Al-Sadr seems heavily influenced by Iran, that doesn't mean that there's sort of a one-to-one relationship between his interests, the Iranian government's interest, and the interests of the satirist movement. In fact, I think the Madi army and its composition is a good example of this.

The Madi army was not some conventional army like the Iraqi army or the American army. It was a kind of mass movement slash army drawn from many, many Iraqis who were poor and unemployed. A militia, a popular militia. Correct. But it was huge and well-funded. and it was developed the capacity to actually start picking fights with Americans. Thousands of men marching purposefully through the streets in unison,

dressed from head to toe in black and chanting repeatedly. We are the army of Magtada. We are the Mahadi army. With most estimates putting the number of fighters in the tens of thousands. After Sutter comes back to Iraq in late 2003 and the Madi army begins to coalesce, something started happening in Iraq that was, outside of the Shia Muslims control, but would ultimately put people like Sadr in direct conflict with the United States. So we'll get into this in the next part of the episode, but the gist of it is this. The American invasion of Iraq had the effect of radicalizing a ton of Sunni Muslims

within Iraq, but also the countries surrounding it. And we're going to get into some of that radicalization within Iraq later. But the terrorists who knocked down the, you know, dominoes that began the process of us going into Iraq. And by dominoes, I mean the Twin Towers. Keeping that. That's funny. Those guys were Saudi Arabian. So a bunch of people from countries around Iraq. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia began to make their way into Iraq.

Extreme Wahhabists cut from the kind of extremist mold that you would later see in groups like ISIS. And in August 2003, they began setting off bombs. The suicide bombers were. really mostly these foreign guys, according to Coburn and other officials who were studying the phenomenon at the time. Although they were sort of notionally tied to Abu Musab al-Zerkawi, the shadowy al-Qaeda figure in Iraq to whom the U.S. would describe all bad Sunni things. The guy that we actually used as part of the case to go in in the first place because we erroneously said he was a friend of both Saddam and bin Laden. And we'll discuss him more

a little bit after this. Those bombings sort of coalesced around the general jihadi radicalization that the American invasion had inspired and growing Sunni discontent within Iraq at the American occupation. By the end of 2003, a couple hundred Iraqi civilians were killed by suicide bombs, and that toll would skyrocket throughout 2004 and even higher in the years after the fact. In March 2004, as the suicide bombing campaign from radical Sunni extremists was like, you know, reaching higher and higher levels. We're now a... a year into the occupation as well. The suicide bombs struck one target in one day in particular that sort of changed the tenor

in terms of the Shia resistance. Suicide bombs targeted Shia observing a multi-day religious ritual in March 2004, killing more than 130 people in the cities of Baghdad and Karbala. And that same month, Paul Bremer was starting to feel particularly antsy about the rise of one Mukta al-Satar. The increasing belligerence of the Madi army, which was getting in progressively more confrontation with British, Spanish, and American troops all throughout Iraq, eventually Paul Bremer and the CPA felt I have to do something about al-Sadr. So in the days after the deaths of many dozens of mostly Shia Muslims, Paul Bremer had the bright idea to close down the Sadurist's newspaper in Baghdad for 60 days. Apparently, the article that really set Bremer off was one called, quote,

Bremmer follows in footsteps of Saddam. So obviously, in order to dispel that horrible notion, he shut down a newspaper in his new, you know, dictatorial position. The reaction from Satter's followers was immediate and violent. Didn't the Americans promise us freedom and democracy, they asked? But he wanted to put Sotter in a timeout. Yes.

He thought that he was going to give this, you know, stupid provincial thug, a spanking. And that wasn't what happened. In fact, everything snowballed from there. Tens of thousands of Iraqis took to the streets in Baghdad to protest Bremer's actions. And Bremer, confident that he had kept Al-Sada in his place, actually focused his attention on fighting the Sunnis on the separate front in Western Iraq in Fallujah, which we'll get to later.

This was a huge mistake. The Sadrists were then able to quite suddenly take control of huge chunks of southern Iraq. Satter's army took over several Shiite towns and expelled coalition forces from the Holy Capital. During this time, there was also a skirmish that came to be known as Black Sunday in Baghdad in which a number of U.S. soldiers died. Ultimately, this wasn't particularly sustainable as the solderists couldn't actually hold that must territory, but they proved a point. And they did accomplish two really important things. The first of which was that Sotter City and Baghdad became a legitimate stronghold of the Sauterist movement that could not be dislodged and with which

the Americans were going to have to contend for the next number of years. Well, if it's called Sotter City, I mean, you might as well put the Sauterous movement inside. I mean, it would have been pretty embarrassing if Al-Sauder had lost control of Sarder, Sarder City. You got a, yeah, brand management. And the other place that he had held under his control was Najaf in the southeast. And now this triggered a brutal siege of Najaf, which Al-Sadr survived. And, in fact, it was so brutal, and it made such headlines that there were Sunni fighters in Fallujah who were making their way to... Oh, man.

to Najaf, simply because they saw this incredible embarrassment that Al-Assadr was making of the Americans. Right. So by this point, if you recall last episode where we focused on the first year of Paul Bremer, this is near the end of his term. And in June 2004, Bremer finally made the handoff to officially give the keys to Iraq to a new interim government. The amazing ceremony that marked this occasion was Bremer handing over a big manila folder to the new prime minister. We welcome Iraq's steps to take its rightful place and equality and honor among the three nations of the world. sincerely L. Paul Bremer, ex-administrator, who followed him to do that guy was named Iyad Alawi. If that name sounds familiar, it's because we talked about him in episode two.

one of the CIA former Baathist goons that we use to try and commit terrorism inside of Iraq and do a coup in the middle of the 90s. The other person who is important to know here is another Ayatollah, whose name is Ali al-Sastani, who was then in his mid-70s and is the de facto spiritual leader of Shia Muslims. He's still alive now, right? He is still alive, and he's still influential. He's causing a ruckus right now. And O'Awi, when he came into power, he made a very big mistake very quickly.

And that first big mistake is that while Al-Sistani, the most important spiritual leader for Shia Muslims in Iraq, was out of the country for medical treatment, Al-Awi tried to keep him out. Woodward reports that Al-Awi's excuse for this to the Americans was that he didn't like the, quote, turbans. Yeah, there's a lot of quotes where he's like, we need to get rid of the turban. And Al-Sahder and Al-Sistani are not the same kind of guys. They're two different types of guys, is what I'm saying here. Al-Sastani was a more, you know, whizzined kind of, like, senior figure. The Great Owl. Kind of. And he continues to serve that kind of role.

And he's operated as a very sort of subtle power broker, both among Shia Muslims and between Shia Muslims and the power-sharing agreements that were starting to, at least the Americans were trying to cobble together for whatever government would emerge in Iraq. And Al-Sauder sees things differently. Al-Sauder is fundamentally anti-American. his abiding interest is not to recreate the Islamic Republic of Iran because it should be noted the people that the Americans are working with. They're the friends of Iran.

They're also friends of Iran. Everybody's a friend of Iran if you're a Shia Iraqi exile, considering that the Islamic Republic of Iran is the largest and most important Shia Muslim country in the Middle East. So Al-Sahar did not want to recreate the Islamic Republic of Iran in Iraq, but he wanted to create an Islamically observant state free from the purview of the American. Right. And his ambition to accomplish that is what set him apart from the other Shia clerics. So Al-Sauder season opening, and this is in early August 2004, when All Sistani's, you know, kept out of the country now.

And he rallies as supporters in Najaf. And Marine commanders respond, and they begin without approval from their superiors, a prolonged engagement. Engage. the ending of which basically left al-Sadr in control of Najat. What our mission is, and our mission is that we'll do as soon as we can, the will be the destruction of Sadr's militia, and then is to kill or capture Al-Sauder himself. So although Al-Sadr's Madi army spent a good chunk of 2004

trading shots in territory with American troops in Baghdad and Najaf, the emerging insurgency wasn't really centered on Shia Muslims more generally. In fact, it was Sunni Muslims in the first few years after the invasion that mounted the fiercest resistance to the American occupation. Through suicide bombs, through roadside bombs, through a whole variety of tactics that would become infamous and staples on the nightly news. Would this be because in part the Shia population, however much they'd come to load the Americans like everybody else, were at first released from that Baathist Sunni clique that was ruling them and had a generally more optimistic view of what could be possible at this point rather than the Sunnis? Yes, absolutely. I think one of the ways to look at the Sunni insurgency and what fueled it is the sense of dispossession that many Sunnis felt with the fall of Saddam Hussein and the Batha's party. This emerging insurgency, the waves of suicide bombings that broke out in late 2003, rippling from Najif to Baghdad to Mosul, the American. The American, Americans didn't really count on this happening after the invasion, and thus were

unprepared to identify who might be doing it. Now, when Colin Powell went to the United Nations in February of 2003 to help seal the deal on the Iraq war, he brought up a guy named Abu Musab al-Zerkawi. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zakawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Okhidal lieutenant. Right, and we talked about him in our episode, even before the Powell speech. You know, he had been identified supposedly as a link between Saddam and bin Laden, because while he was a jihadist and tangentially related to bin Laden,

according to American intelligence, he was also operating inside of Iraq. However, he was in the part of Iraq that Saddam didn't control, and he turned out to be, by testimony of his own associates, a rival of bin Laden, who had not sworn any kind of oath and was not really any kind of member of al-Qaeda. Yeah, and all this conspiracizing kind of on the part of the Americans about this, because it really is just like inventing shit out of thin air. Oh, yeah. They, like, it sort of goes to show just how detached they were from the reality on the ground.

And as the Sunni and as Sunni resistance started began to pick up around the country, the Americans started, you know, looking for something to explain while this was happening. Right. And Al-Qaeda was already a familiar answer. And so they shoved their hand in a hat. And the name that they came up with was Abu Musab al-Zerkawi. So Zerkawi himself was an unremarkable guy. He was born in Jordan.

He fought alongside Mujahideen and Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Typical resume. Yeah, you know, he got hooked up with some more hardcore jihadists in Pakistan in the early 90s. And then he spent most of the 90s in jail in Jordan. Al-Zerkawi's presence in Iraq was, as presented by the journalist, Lawrence Wright, particularly inspired by the venom he had for Shia Muslims. So while the American government claimed that Al-Zarkawi had been working with Saddam prior to the U.S. invasion, there's no evidence to support that. In fact, Saddam may not have even been aware that Al-Zarkawi

was even in the country. So the story isn't that Zarkawi was under Saddam's thumb or that he was in cahoots with Saddam. The story is that when we invaded Iraq in March 2003, we unleashed Zarqawi on the rest of the country. Oh, the reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Now, as I mentioned in the first part of this episode, a significant chunk of the Sunni fighters who carried out those suicide bombings were foreign fighters, the jihadists from abroad who were galvanized by the American invasion. The role of these guys, along with Zarkawi, however, was aggressively overhyped. As I said, just a bit ago about Zarkawi,

it was part of the American government strategy of finding things to explain that were very simple, about the insurgency and that they could get under control and did not speak to larger problems about the state of the U.S. occupation. Right, and it wasn't just a simpler explanation. We didn't want to admit that, like any colonized or occupied people, the Iraqis themselves were rising up against the Americans. Much better to say that there were these troublemakers from abroad who were sneaking in and poisoning the well, these foreign jihadists. There are bathists, there are Fetahim Saddam people, there are criminals, there are jihadists coming in from other countries.

countries. There are people stirring up mischief from neighboring countries. Throughout the war, we would try to make it seem as though this was, none of this could possibly be coming from the Iraqis. These must be Syrians and these must be Jordanians. And you might think of American sniper, the sniper in the black outfit or whatever. He's Syrian. He's not Iraqi, because Iraqis, you know, they were grateful. Right. And you'll see reverberations of that and how we talk about ISIS a decade later and so on. And, you know, to be clear, Zarkawi did a lot of bad shit, more of which we'll talk about later on. But his role as an explanation for what was going on was part of a deliberate strategy. In fact, it was part of a

self-admitted sci-op campaign by the Pentagon. Brandon, I want you to look at something. Can you just like describe to me these two slides that I'm showing you? These look like PowerPoint slides. and the first slide, offensive strategic communications fighting the negative insurgency Abu Musab al-Zarkawi selective leak to Dexter Filkins. That's the New York Times guy

and then later New Yorker guy, right? 10 million reward, now 25 million. The next bullet point, the Matrix. Cool. Tight. March 04. Villanize Zarqawi slash leverage xenophobia response

through media operations, sci-op, special ops. And the second slide, this slide is called result. Through aggressive strategic communications, Abu Musab al-Zarkawi now represents, one bullet point, terrorism in Iraq, next. Foreign fighters in Iraq, next. Suffering of Iraqi people.

Finally, denial of Iraqi aspirations, disrupting the transfer of sovereignty. And the last bit says, effect. eliminate popular support for a potentially sympathetic insurgency deny ability of insurgency to quote take root among the people well that's smoking gun if i've ever seen that might be the only smoking gun in the iraq war so that's from a story published in april 2006 by thomas ricks who was a defense military correspondent embedded in iraq at the time for the washington post. Now, he framed the story, like, I think, brilliantly. And while I have some quibbles with

Ricks elsewhere, this is a really, like, this is, I believe, one of the best stories that was pieces of reporting that was written in the Iraq War, not just because of what it showed about what the government was willing to do to paint Zarqawi, and we'll decode a bit of these slides in a second, but also because of how he framed it. Here's the lead of his article published on April 10th, 2006. The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to Baghdad identify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration

tie the war to the organization responsible for the September 11th, 2001 attacks. So what these slides and what this story showed is that in the months and the year after the invasion of Iraq, the cherry-picked intelligence that was used to build the case for war was then repurposed to justify to the world why things were going to shit in Iraq. And the way that they did this was through incredible deception. They, you know, what they call media operations are a sciop. And the selective leak is, I think, a kind of terrific story. and, you know, this Dexter Filkin story that they refer to in the slide,

the headline is U.S. says files seek Kada aid in Iraq. That's a horrible fucking headline. Like, it just doesn't clarify anything. That's staying in. The story that they talk about published in February 2004 begins, American officials here have obtained a detailed proposal that they conclude was written by an operative in Iraq to senior leaders of al-Qaeda, asking for help to wage a sectarian war in Iraq in the next months.

Oh, so that explains why everything's happened. It's not to do with anything the Americans did. It has to do with the fact that there are all these nefarious outsiders who are trying to pit these Iraqis against one another. So if we want to talk about how successful this Saup was, this media operation was General Mark Kimet, who was the military official responsible for this and who was serving a post in Central Command, he said that it was the most successful influence operation that the Army had run to date. Yeah, the Saup was real. And it was delivered from the very top brass of the Bush administration.

There's an article from CBS here. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is comparing Abu Mishab al-Zarkawi to Adolf Hitler in the final days of Nazi Germany. In a pep talk to thousands of paratroopers Thursday, Rumsfeld likened Al-Qaeda's reportedly wounded chief in Iraq. There's a nice little assist from the media there. To a cornered Adolf Hitler during the final days of Nazi Germany. So, not only is he the answer to why Iraq is going to shit, he's also, I don't know how, but somehow comparable to a guy who commanded a giant industrial army in the middle of Europe. Or that the Sunni insurgency, like Hitler's Nazi army, was something facing imminent defeat.

It may be that we, with Zarqawi, have the opportunity to pick him up if the intelligence continues, the way we did with Saddam Hussein, so that one day it all comes to us. we have the big aha, all the intelligence comes together, we find them, and then we kill them or we capture it. But yeah, the Zarqawi myth is a really important thing to debunk because with it you debunk the idea that the insurgency was foreign jihadis rather than actual Iraqis who wanted Americans out. But don't just take it from us. Take it from the CIA itself. Washington Post reported in 2005, the CIA's analysis showed the insurgency wasn't just former Bathis or dead enders, but quote, newly radicalized Sunni Iraqis, nationalists offended by the occupying

force, and others disenchanted by the economic turmoil and destruction caused by the fighting, i.e. America's occupation. One other thing I just want to note is this insurgency, which was mostly Iraqis, had the support of most of the population in Iraq, who weren't themselves taking up arms. And some people might go, oh, why would this be? Didn't the insurgency? weren't they the ones carrying out all these horrifying attacks on civilians? A minority of them, the Zarqarweites, yes. And those guys did truly sick shit that was obviously contributing to the horror and the violence. But the intelligence, whether it was collected by the military itself or by third-party groups,

showed that the vast majority of attacks carried out by insurgents were on coalition and American forces. And a small percentage, like four or five percent in one of these reports, was attacks on civilians. Zarkawi's not going to give up. That's what he does. He gets up in the morning and wants to recruit people and arm them and finance them and kill people. Preferably, anybody can get his hands on. It doesn't matter what their age is, what their sex is, what their nationality is. That's what he does. He isn't going to give up. If it wasn't all a giant Al-Qaeda Zarqawi organized thing, as the U.S. painted the Sunni insurgency to be, then what was the Sunni insurgency? So what was really happening was this. Sunni cities and tribal areas around Iraq. And remember, Sunnis are a relative minority within Iraq's broader population. So these are cities that are a bit further out. Most importantly, the city of Fallujah, which we're going to discuss in the second. Whereabouts in Iraq are they located? Further, like central to the west and then also toward the north. In these areas,

debatification, the dissolution of the Iraqi army, and the violence of the American occupation were radicalizing a whole lot of people who had nothing to do with Zarqawi. Right. It didn't really have much to do with jihadist ideology more generally either. It was just a response to the mass deprivation that they witness and the genuine belief that many of them had that Shia Muslims were conspiring to kill them with the Americans. It's easy to say that like, oh, this is like, you know, mass delusion. Like, like, like, people weren't, wasn't about to be some like incredible genocide. This was how these people felt. I mean, you just place yourself in the shoes of someone who's living in their town and then at night the U.S. military busts down their doors and steals their kid

or shoots their kid dead, whether or not he was guilty of anything, you start to think, well, Saddam's gone, he was, for better or for worse, our guarantor politically in a Shia majority country. Someone must be conspiring to fuck us over. Correct. And with tens of thousands of Sunnis blacklisted from civil service jobs, T-shirts, aid workers, infrastructure experts, and so on, barred from holding the kinds of jobs that they previously have, in addition to the widespread unemployment caused by the dissolution of the Iraqi army. U.S. forces outside the coalition's headquarters say their patrol opened fire after coming under attack. Many of the demonstrators are former Iraqi troops demanding jobs.

And so I don't want to say that this was all like Sunni versus Shia, because even among the Sunni insurgency, as we talked about in the last episode, as even among Shia Muslims, there were all of these incredible divisions. In fact, most of the Sunni insurgency was not dictated by loyalty to Zarkawi, as we've just talked about. It was dictated by familial, communal, and in some cases, religious ties. And this was another easy narrative for Americans, whether those in power or those watching TV at home, a way to explain away why Iraq was going badly is, oh, these religious nutcases over there in the Muslim world, they just can't stop killing each other. It was an explainer that required no greater understanding of what was. was happening to these people and just said, oh, they're religious nuts. They should all chill out. So the former Iraqi soldiers who hooked up with Sunni militias, you know, they picked fights with occupying American forces and also frequently were drawn into confrontations with American forces. But what the Sunni insurgency would probably most become known for, I think the international

sort of icon of it was the roadside bombs that would blow up Humvees and became a staple on the nightly news back home in the united states they don't put them inside their farmhouses or on their property what they do is they dig little shallow holes along roads uh and they throw them mortar rounds rifles uh anything explosive we're looking to the to the flanks and we just passed by an idea and it just blew up in our face so in the first part of this episode we described mokhtra al-saders and the Shia militias that he represented and the confrontations that they got into over the first couple of years of the occupation with the American government in Sadr City in Baghdad and then in Najaf in southern Iraq.

The central spoke of the Sunni insurgency. It was the city of Fallujah, which is about 40 miles west of Baghdad. On March 31st, 2004, four blackwater contractors were killed in Fallujah. Two of the four contractors, their bodies were strung up and hung from a bridge and footage and photos were widely rebroadcast and the American political leadership, you know, was pretty aggressive in saying that something had to be done. Now, the military didn't really have any strategic objectives for what to do to contain or eliminate the insurgency in Fallujah other than kill the insurgents. In fact, insurgents in Fallujah had been escalating

activities against American soldiers so effectively that they almost killed General John Abizaid, the head U.S. military official for the entire Middle East, IEDs and RPGs, not just roadside bombs, but actual active patrols were taking shots at American soldiers and beginning fights on a very routine basis. And this all took place in the period before and after the ambush on the Blackwater contractors. Within a week, however, after the attack, the Bush administration and the military cobbled together Operation Valiant Resolve, which was their attempt to take back the city from the insurgents. It commenced on April 4th. The attack was a spectacular failure. The military did not take back the city. In fact, after

capturing a chunk of the city, the interim Iraqi government forced the Americans to back the fuck out because of how badly the Americans had demolished city. In fact, here's how one lieutenant colonel, a certain James Mad Dog Mattis, described his initial orders to troops. The commanding general has changed the op order from capture or kill the enemy to kill or capture. He wants the emphasis on kill. And the Americans ultimately had to pull out on May 1st a month later. So the American operation, which had begun on April 4th, ended on May 1 when they pulled out.

So the Americans actually, they didn't want to totally abandon Fallujah, but they didn't really get any direction from above on what they had to do. So this is the story of the Fallujah Brigade. So the brigade was about a 1,600-man volunteer force thrown together as a compromise between the Marines and the Iraqi interim government. It was an idea cooked up by an American general, and Paul Brammer and the CPA didn't really know much about it.

So a bunch of the people who comprised this 1,600 man force, in a city of 300,000 people, by the way. The 1600-man volunteer force, a bunch of them actually used to be insurgents, and a bunch of them part of the, you know, same exact kinds of, you know, quote-unquote terror networks that Americans hope to penetrate. And then the Americans gave them guns and authority. It was completely ineffective and people deserted fights. They was widespread corruption.

And it was basically just like a brutal mercenary force. And the Marine colonel who was in charge of it told a Los Angeles Times reporter after the fact the whole Fallujah Brigade thing was a fiasco. The whole brigade was completely ineffective and it was an embarrassment and it was a strategy that didn't work. And in fact, it had just given a bunch of weapons to a bunch of people who would later use them against America. So this all wraps up in the spring. So by the fall, Fallujah remains outside of American control. And because the first elections for the Iraqi government were going to take place in January 2005, it was a pretty big problem that a city of 300,000 people would not be able to participate in those elections. And in fact, would be perhaps

an incredibly destabilizing thing against those elections. And it's all. And it's all. And it's also, you know, worth mentioning that for the Americans to try and put together some sort of like, even like pretend viable government in Iraq, they were going to need Sunnis to have buy-in. Yeah. And not counting all those potential Sunni votes in the city was something that forced their hand in a situation that they'd already created for themselves. So the American military decided not to act until after the U.S. elections were over in November 04. And they just maintained the siege with airstrikes and so on before they were ready to actually do their big big boy battle to force out the Sunni insurgents from the city. On November 7th, the Americans were ready.

And Patrick Coburns described what follows as the quote, sort of set piece battle at which the American military usually excelled. Let's be candid here for a moment. Allow us to be frank. Allow me to be frank. Let me be frank. The Americans were always going to win. It was just a matter of how much damage would be done before victory was declared.

And it was, by the way, it was 8,000 American troops and Iraqi army soldiers that were still around against roughly 3,000 insurgents. The vast majority of the city's civilians ran out of town knowing what was about to happen. Yeah. But the Battle of Fallujah that follows is generally regarded as the single most combat heavy event of the whole damn war, and it turned to the city into a scrap heap. The Americans, as ever, were in denial about how much damage they were doing. 36,000 of 50,000 homes in the city were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines. A British officer told Colburn that on one night, over 40, 155 millimeter artillery rounds, which can blow chunks out of buildings, were fired into a single small sector of the city. An early well-known story of the operation was the taking of a hospital,

where American and Iraqi soldiers ordered patients and doctors, you know, people who were trying to administer care in the middle of a war zone, they ordered these people to sit or lie down on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their back. The U.S. military used chemical weapons as well. White phosphorus, which would be used by the IDF in Gaza just a few years later, ended up burning and scarring civilian bystanders because, as the Americans would later note in their case against Saddam for using the same exact weapons, chemical weapons used in an urban area tend to have unintended consequences. I would even just say I quarrel with the idea that the American military was in denial about the damage they were doing. I think you pull a lot of

articles at the time and a lot of the quotes at the time from colonels and generals. They did know what was going on here. We have this sort of automatic reaction to think of the U.S. as this big bumbling empire, but they knew what they were doing in Fuluzia. They knew that they were destroying this place. And just like in Vietnam, you know, Operation Phoenix, the goal was to terrorize. The goal was to annihilate. And that's exactly what they achieved. So from the time that the Americans launched their big assault on Fallujah in November 2004 to the real sort of bitter end of the fighting, it took about six weeks. But the full extent of the damage done to Iraqis wouldn't really be known for at least another few years.

A 2010 study from English researchers reported increases in birth defects, inform mortality, and cancer among Fallujah residents that exceeded the rates among survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. One explanation for this is that the U.S. tanks and jets were using depleted uranium rounds. We did that in the Gulf War, too, in 1991. These are literally radioactive weapons. Obviously, all of this violated international law. The U.S. military confessed to having kids.

killed about 1,200 insurgents, and civilian tolls were said to be maybe 800 people. I'm drawing here from a great post by Richard Seymour. Later, Iraqi groups and medical workers put that estimated death toll much higher to as many as 6,000 deaths, most of them civilians. And beyond just the death toll, horrifying as it is, we turned Fallujah into a high-key police state for everyone, the hundreds of thousands, who were returning to their homes. And here's some things we were doing over there that I don't think Americans at home really had any idea about. I don't know if they have an idea about them now.

Boston Globe, late 2004, returning fallusions will face clampdown. Quote, under the American military plans, quote, troops would funnel fulusions to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retinization. scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times. Buses would ferry them into the city where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned. DNA into a database, badges, your papers please, at all times, and no more cars for you. Finally, the Marine officers designed a forced labor system, requiring men to work in military-style battalions.

quote, depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble clearing platoons. So, the people of this city have to flee by the hundreds of thousands because the Americans shell the shit out of their city. Then when they return, they're processed through the Gestapo machine and conscripted to clean up the rubble from said American attack. November 13th, the heroism of Marines like Castle breaks the enemy. after six days of intense urban fighting the Marines have killed 1,000 insurgents and captured 200 more the operation just one day longer than the April attack is a success the effect of retaking Fallujah in this brutal extreme fashion

as with most of the American policy of occupation at that time was to move the Americans about one step forward and five steps backward. The insurgents simply learned to stop taking whole cities for Americans to then reclaim. Although many Iraqi Shia were incensed by the suicide attacks by Sunnis that were believed to have been coming from Fallujah, the non-stop media coverage of American action in Fallujah and of the American brutality in Fallujah ultimately only emboldened the Sunnis to step up their attacks. The trajectory of this was really, really quite dangerous. It's something that we're going to get to later. The Americans are sensitive about their military casualties. They don't want too much

bad news to get out. They want the good news. The Kalulika was a great victory, and it will be in military terms. But that doesn't mean that they're about to quell the insurgency in Iraq. So this episode, we've talked a lot about some of the battles, bombings, and broader politicking of both the Sunni and Shia insurgencies and factions. And we're going to check back in on Zarqawi, Mukta al-Sadr and others later on. But I'd like to talk now about some of the things that the Americans did that helped motivate these people. When we talk about what were the things that inspired thousands and thousands of people to take up arms against the United States, Abu Ghraib is probably the first place we should look. In my experience, said General Stanley McChrystal,

in his memoir years later, we found... that nearly every first-time jihadist claimed Abu Ghraib had first jolted him into action. In January 2004, while briefing Bush, Donald Rumsfeld let slip that something had happened at an American prison in Iraq. Oh, by the way, Rumsfeld mentioned, we have this incident. There were allegations of prisoner abuse by army military police and interrogators at Abu Ghraib. And Abu Ghraib was actually Saddam's old fortress prison that was already infamous for all the horrible fucked up shit that happened while he was in control of it. Right. And rather than immediately shut down Abu Ghraib, the Americans repurposed it, using it as a place to put, you know,

thousands of detainees, as they called them together, while the Americans sorted out what to do exactly on the ground. This meant that lots of people who probably shouldn't have been rubbing shoulders if you wanted to prevent an insurgency were in fact rubbing shoulders. And this includes, for example, the future leader of ISIS. But Abu Ghraib was repurposed. far beyond its function just to hold people. When Rumsfeld told Bush about this abuse in January 2004, he said an investigation was underway. As the journalist Bob Woodward described Rumsfeld saying it, we're on it.

Throughout 2003 and into 2004, a steady trickle of reports from Amnesty International and the Associated Press had said that there were human rights abuses being committed at Abu Ghraib, but there weren't a whole lot of specifics. But on April 28th, 2004, 60 Minutes ran an episode about the prison that was followed up shortly thereafter by a report from the New Yorker by Cy Hirsch. These revelations would change everything. Major General Antonio Taguba, the author of the report, wrote that American jailers did the following to the Iraqi prisoners under their control. And here I'm quoting directly.

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid. on detainees. Threatening detainees with a charge 9mm pistol. Pouring cold water on naked detainees. Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair. Threatening male detainees with rape and forcing them to wear women's underwear. Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell. Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick. Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack and in one instance actually biting. a detainee. And one quote from the report that I've amended slightly for clarity that I wanted to

bring that I thought was also pretty important. The detainees were all naked. A bunch of people from military intelligence and the military police were there that night. The detainees were made to do strange exercises by sliding on their stomach, jumping up and down, they'd water thrown on them, and they got wet, and they were called all kinds of names such as gay, and they were asked do they like to make love to guys. At one point, Nakhla goes on to say, they were then handcuffed together by their hands and their legs were shackled,

and they were stacked on top of one another, ensuring that their naked genitals were placed next to one another. The evidence for all of these claims was aired on 60 Minutes in the forms of these now horrifically iconic photos and videos that were taken by the American soldiers themselves while committing these acts. Repercussions were felt quickly. About two weeks after the 60 Minutes report aired, a video was posted online depicting the beheading of 26-year-old American Nick Berg, who had disappeared in Iraq weeks earlier.

Al-Zarkawi and his associates took credit for the killing, a new grim feature of the war in Iraq that would become more common over the following years. January, one of theirs, a kid, one of the kids from inside the unit, goes into the police and shows the photographs. They started an investigation. Rumsfeld admits, after the story's become known, that by the end of January, he's been told in the middle of January, and he's told the president right away about it. No looking at the pictures, but they know how bad it is. What do they do for the next four months? What do they do at the highest levels of my government until the stories become public? Nothing except prosecute seven GIs. And we still don't know everything that happened inside of Abu Ghraib.

some of the darker stuff that we still don't know was claimed by Cy Hirsch at the time he said that the U.S. had evidence both audio and video of young boys being sexually abused in the prison by U.S. forces and a report in the Washington Post in May 2004 quotes one detainee who said he witnessed an army translator having sex with a boy at the prison

quote he said the boy was between 15 and 18 years old someone hung sheets to block the view but he said that he heard the boy voice screams and climbed a door to get a better look. He said he watched the assault and told investigators that it was documented by a female soldier taking pictures. In addition to the torture, there were also reports of dozens of detainees at Abu Ghraib had died, either perhaps killed by their American jailers or people who had died in other suspicious circumstances while in American custody. Now, the story that the American soldiers who committed these abuses told

was that they were instructed and encouraged to do so by the military intelligence and CIA officials who were overseeing interrogations at the prison. In fact, portions of the so-called Bush torture memos that were released by the Obama administration in 2009 would directly link the kinds of abuses committed at Abu Ghraib with what the Bush administration explicitly said was okay. The punishments handed out for the abuses at Abu Ghraib

were, frankly, relatively light. 12 soldiers were convicted, two colonels were dismissed. Nobody else lost their job. And on your screen right now, making his way to the Senate hearing defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who answered the questions today about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by the U.S. military. Pretty much everyone was clamoring for Rumsfeld resignation in the media. And although Rumsfeld would claim that he offered his resignation to Bush twice and that it had been rejected, and that Cheney, his old chum from Congress and the Ford administration,

pushed to keep him in. All that sentimental bullshit, it kept Tan Rumsfeld in his job. These events occurred on my watch. As Secretary of Defense, I am accountable for them, and I take full responsibility. Over the next few months, the Americans would start trying to thin out the crowd of thousands of prisoners inside Abu Ghraib and let hundreds of people out. The prison would temporarily be closed and then reopened by the interim Iraqi government a few years later before being shut down in 2014, and it remains closed to this day. Although George Bush would eventually issue an actual apology with the words, I am sorry, or I apologize, or some variation on that core theme of what it means to give an apology, initially, that was not what he said to the world. Today, we're going to let you go out on what he actually said when he went on the Arabic news TV channel Al Arabia on May 5th, 2004, a week after the scandal broke.

Bye. It's very important for people, your listeners, to understand in our country that when an issue is brought to our attention on this magnitude, we act. And we act in a way where leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. And we act in a way where, you know, our Congress asked pointed questions to the leadership. In other words, people want to know the truth. That stands in contrast to dictatorships. A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this. A dictator wouldn't be saying that the system will be investigated and the world will see the results of the investigation.

A dictator wouldn't admit reforms needed to be done. And so the people in the Middle East must understand that this was horrible. But we're dealing with it in a way that we'll bring confidence to not only our citizens, which is very important, but confidence to people in the world that this situation will be rectified and justice will be done. be done.